How are you positioning yourself between people experiencing oppression and those calling for and actively engaging in their subjugation? How are you reflecting and affirming the sacred beauty present in those experiencing marginalization?
I ask these questions because I think it’s necessary for us to consider how we are physically, materially, and politically oriented as ministers of the Gospel of Jesus. Read More
The Pastoral is Political: Trans Visibility and Equality
Yesterday was International Transgender Visibility Day—a day to celebrate transgender people and raise awareness of discrimination faced by trans people around the world. Like International Women’s Day, Worlds AIDS Day, and International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, one day isn’t enough. Sex Workers, AIDS, Women, and Transgender folks—we all deserve more than 1/365th… Read More
The Pastoral Is Political: #BurnCandlesNotRainbows
Chicago Priest Burns Rainbow Banner: On Sept. 14, Father Paul Kalchik, priest at Resurrection Catholic Church in the neighborhood of Avondale in Chicago took a church banner that displayed a rainbow and a cross, cut it into pieces, and burned it in the Easter Vigil fire pit in front of a few congregation members. In… Read More
Saturday Prayer – Prayer for Pride
Holy One, Today I was reminded again what I keep forgetting. That this kind of Pride, the Pride for which we march, the Pride we celebrate, has an opposite, too. This Pride’s opposite is not humility, it is shame. So we gather and we march and we revel not because we lack humility. But because we stand… Read More
Pastoral is Political: Queer and Holy
On the Sunday of the Pulse nightclub shooting last year, I was preaching at my home church. (I am not the primary pastor.) I am a Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) pastor, so the shooting could not go unremarked in our worship that day in 2016. I breathed deeply, prayed hard, and did the best I… Read More
Not an “Issue”
One of the hardest parts about being a person of faith committed to justice is when basic human dignity is made a political issue. Transgender people are not an “issue,” and their humanity is not up for debate. Transgender people, like all other people, are human beings, created in the image of God, deserving of… Read More
Friday Prayer: I Beg
Oh, God- I beg you- do not let my heart become hardened. In the midst of grief and fear, frustration and pain, despondency and despair, I beg you- do not let my heart become hardened. As I continue to press that Black Lives Matter, that vaginas are not second-class reproductive organs, that LGBTQ people… Read More
Resistance and Resilience
Two nights before the election, I found out that Steven, a former student of mine, had died at the age of 27. This young man had been a warrior for LGBTQ justice in high school. He endured the worst kinds of bullying as an out gay kid in a very unaccepting place. And yet… he… Read More
RevGals Anti-Racism Project: “Trouble I’ve Seen,” Week 8
“The more that white people killed and displaced Native Americans, the more they sought to shackle and bring over black bodies. The presence of the original hosts of the land constituted a threat to white identity and the sense of America as a ‘white country.’” Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I’ve Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views… Read More
The Pastoral Is Political
Adapted from the remarks I gave at the first-ever LGBTQ Pride event in Rochester, NH When I was in high school, friends wondered at my participation in a faith that they saw as exclusionary. Specifically: how could a queer person participate in a religion that excluded gays? I didn’t understand, then; I was lucky, in my… Read More
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